Not long ago, I found myself sitting at the edge of a field with a bear and thirty or forty thousand very angry bees. The bear was there because of the bees. The bees were there because of me, and why I was there was a question I found myself unable to answer precisely.
In a roundabout sort of way, the encounter had been set in motion several months earlier, in late February, when the Times ran a story about a new ailment afflicting honeybees. It had been given a name—colony-collapse disorder—but no one had any idea what was causing it; beekeepers would open their hives only to discover that they were suddenly and mysteriously empty. According to the article, some keepers had lost seventy per cent of their colonies, and these losses, in turn, were likely to reduce the yields of crops ranging from kiwis to avocados. All this information struck me as disturbing, and therefore interesting. I thought that at some point I might want to write about it myself, and so I began to read up on bees.
The literature of apiculture is vast and seductive; I learned one amazing thing after another. Honeybees are the only animals besides humans known to have a representational language: they convey to one another the location of food by dancing. When the queen lays an egg, she is able to choose its sex. Males, known as drones, perform no useful function except to mate. They are loutish and filthy, and the workers—sterile females—tolerate their presence for a few months a year, then systematically murder them. A single pound of clover honey represents the distilled nectar of some 8.7 million flowers. In a week, a productive hive can add seventy pounds of honey to its stores. Pretty soon, I had moved on to beekeeping manuals. I learned about different “races” of honeybees, each with its own “dialect” and disposition: Italians, which are golden and laid-back but can have trouble producing enough honey for winter; Carniolans, which are darker and hardier but prone to swarm; and Russians, which build up slowly but are the hardiest of all. I also learned about honeybee diseases: varroa mites, tiny parasites that attach themselves to bees and feed on their blood; tracheal mites, even tinier parasites, which attack bees’ breathing tubes; American foulbrood, bacteria that turn bee larvae into stringy goo; and sac brood, a virus that leaves larvae swimming in bubbles of muck. Finally, and, I suppose, predictably, I began leafing through beekeeping catalogues, weighing the advantages of wooden frames versus plastic ones and full-body “English-style” bee suits versus simpler (and cheaper) veils. By the time I ordered my hive, the initial reason for having one—to learn about colony-collapse disorder—had dissipated. The disease (or whatever it was) hadn’t turned up in the region where I live, which is western Massachusetts. But by that point I wasn’t sure whether I was writing the story to keep bees or keeping bees to write the story.
Bees, which are descended from predatory wasps, turned from eating other insects to feeding on flowers some hundred million years ago. Not coincidentally, this was shortly after flowers first appeared. Since then, it’s been one long evolutionary tango. Some bees have evolved to feed on the nectar of a single type of flower; for example, Andrena florea, a small European bee, relies exclusively on the delicate white blossoms of bryony plants. Conversely, some flowers, like the showy, fragrant orchid Stanhopea embreei, native to Ecuador, are pollinated only by a single species of bee, in this case Eulaema bomboides. Worldwide, nearly twenty thousand species of bees have been identified. Out of these, only perhaps two dozen have been successfully raised by humans, and only one—Apis mellifera, commonly known as the western honeybee—accounts for nearly all the bees maintained by beekeepers in Europe and North America.
Apis mellifera is a floral generalist—the technical term is “polylectic”—meaning that it will feed on just about anything that is blooming. This trait makes honeybees essential to modern agriculture, which has itself evolved to depend on their services. In a five-hundred-acre apple orchard, for example, there simply aren’t enough indigenous pollinators to produce a commercial crop: either the yield will be too low or the fruit will be small or stunted. (An apple has ten ovules, each of which can produce a seed; unless at least six are pollinated, the apple will be misshapen.) Apple growers, therefore, bring additional pollinators into their fields, and honeybees are the only ones that can be delivered in sufficient numbers. Other commercial crops that have come to rely on honeybees include blueberries, cranberries, cherries, cucumbers, watermelons, cantaloupes, and pumpkins.
Almonds, in particular, have extremely high pollination requirements—nearly all the flowers in an orchard must be cross-pollinated to produce a commercial crop—and so California’s increasingly large (and lucrative) almond industry is almost entirely honeybee-dependent; it is estimated that to service the state’s two billion dollars’ worth of almonds next year will require nearly 1.5 million hives, or roughly two-thirds of all the colonies that existed in this country before colony-collapse disorder. (The price of renting a hive during the almond bloom, which starts in late February, rose from fifty-five dollars three years ago to a hundred and thirty-five dollars this year, and next year will likely reach a hundred and seventy dollars.) Five years from now, as more acreage goes into production, it is expected that almonds will require 2.1 million colonies, or nearly all the hives that are currently being kept, both by commercial beekeepers and by hobbyists.
Typically, commercial beekeepers ship their hives by flatbed truck; the hives are stacked on pallets, then unloaded with a forklift. The process is efficient—two men can easily move ten million bees into an orchard in a single day—and also profitable, or at least more profitable than selling honey to a world drenched in corn syrup. But it is hard on the bees. One keeper told me that every time he loads up his hives he expects to lose ten per cent of his queens simply as a result of the jostling. Insecticides are also a problem; even assuming that farmers are careful to avoid spraying when bees are in their fields—something that beekeepers complain is not always the case—there are residues. Finally, the mass movement of honeybees spreads parasites and disease. (Truck 1.5 million hives in to pollinate almonds, and some sixty billion bees will be buzzing around the same trees.) The blood-sucking varroa mite was first reported here in 1987; within a few years, practically every managed colony in the United States had been infected. Since the early eighties, the number of hives has dropped by almost half. Wild honeybees, meanwhile, which were once common across the country, have nearly disappeared.
